Today, a large portion of all data traffic is related to transfer of content, such as e.g. music, movies, news, web-pages, etc. When the number of simultaneous transfers of content over a bottleneck in the network is increasing, the throughput for each of the transfer sessions decreases proportionally, since the total capacity shared by all simultaneous sessions over the bottleneck is constant. In principle, there is no maximum limit on the number of simultaneous transfers allowed over a specific resource, e.g. a transmission link.
Typically, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the mechanism used to adjust the transfer rate depending on the load-conditions.
Further, a large part of the content transfers are made through so called file sharing, e.g. using Bit Torrent, which is a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing communications protocol. The use of file sharing enables large content files to be transferred over the Internet. However, the response time for the delivery of a file, i.e. the time from when the file is requested by a user until the file has reached its destination, could be very long when using file sharing.
Further, content such as web traffic and file transfers are usually transferred using so called “best effort”. “Best effort” usually describes a network service in which the network does not provide any specific guarantees that data is delivered within a certain time limit, or at all, or that a user is given a certain QoS (Quality of Service) or a certain priority, or a specific minimum bandwidth guarantee. In a best effort network, users obtain an unspecified variable bit rate and delivery time, depending on the current traffic load.
Considering the above, there is still room for improvement regarding resource management in content transfer situations.